Day 6: Sofea Daud

Me and my team was assigned to teach English for standard one students during the school hours for one hour and it was quite challenging for us; because some of them could not write and read, so we had to deliver the lesson a bit slower because we had to start from scratch. Despite the challenges that we faced in the classroom, we were glad that towards the end, we managed to make them learn something- even though it was just simple English words like ‘school’, ‘pencil’ and ‘eraser’. After all, it’s the input that they learnt that matter.

In the evening, we held a workshop for the standard 6 students whcih was held in 4 classrooms; involving kids from other two schools. We gave them tests before they were divided to specific groups them on their levels. That evening was the Maths workshop and I was assigned for the weaker group so I gave them simple maths exercises involving basic maths operations and I would say all of the kids in my group were doing pretty well and towards the end of the session, they managed to finish their exercises up until multiplication involving 2 digits- which was really impressive although some of the kids that I taught did the exercises a bit slower than the rest but towards the end, she managed to grasp the idea on how to do subtraction and also multiplication.

The 2-hour night session was for English and for my English group, the kids were doing pretty well. Considering their level, I start off by giving them basic grammar exercises and also I assigned them to find any difficult words that they couldn’t understand from the exercise and all of us discussed the meaning of the words and how it can be used in sentences/essays. This is to make them to understand the sentences better which I think will be quite helpful for them to construct sentences. However, I haven’t taught them on how to construct proper sentences yet but I will gradually give them more exam-oriented exercises to prepare themselves for the exam. Overall, the night session with my kids went on smoothly but since they had a 3-hr workshop in the evening, I would say it drained them quite a bit so they looked exhausted during the english session.

I would say that the whole day was very tiring; since we were occupied with workshop and another two-hour session during the night but to see a bit improvement from the kids is really satisfying. I hope that I could do more for them for the days to come and really hope that they will remember everything that we have taught them.